Potato blight soil

Hello there, one of my potato sacks has unfortunatly suffered from the dreaded blight... i was just wondering what to do with the soil and compost that is in the sack, is it still safe to grow other fruit and veg in there like a broccoli or even a few carrots? should i be treating the soil first with something? or is it okay to grow non-potato like vegatables straight away?

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Potato blight is affecting nearly all the potatoe crops on our allotments. The potatoes harvested will not store so we are giving ours away to friends and neighbours. Have cut some tops down to ground level to leave in the ground for 2 more weeks before harvesting. Then I am cutting the affected leaves from my main crop and wonder if they will be OK. Think you will have to sterilise the soil thoroughly but personally I would dispose of that soil and not put it into your garden either.

I don't think it would be much of a problem if say, you use it in your front garden keeping it well away from where you'd grow pots/tommies out the back. That's just a guess though based on what I've done in the past without blight coming back.

Getting rid of the soil is a bit extreme. In most garden circumstances, the soil is part of the garden and is not normally removed. Sensible crop rotation should keep further crops from being infected by the soil.

But that is only if it's soil-borne in the first place. Blight spores are normally brought in on the wind, in warm damp conditions. Even spore-free soil can't protect from that. The evidence on it remaining active in the soil seems a bit scant, and it's perfectly OK to use the soil for unrelated crops or for ornamental plants.

And for what it's worth, I accidentally planted tomatoes in a bed that had blighted potatoes in it last year. I have sprayed them twice with Bordeaux Mixture, and there's very little sign of blight yet despite the weather - less than in previous years when I was careful to rotate the crops. This year's potatoes, which are in blight-free soil, are a bit of a disaster, as they were very slow to grow, and the blight stopped them in their tracks before there were many potatoes.

If only one sack of spuds has been affected , for peace of mind I wouldn't use the compost in it again, it would be different if the spuds were in open ground but they aren't. Measured up against the cost of new compost or using old which has blight affect spuds in - take it to the tip

For starters, it depends what sort of blight it was. "Blight" has become a generic term for all sorts of fungal problems. The most common fungal problem, though, is Early Blight.

Early Blight infections arrive through the air. The spores are invisible to the naked eye and everywhere. They can land on the soil or drop from the foliage to the soil and will live on. But they don't poison the soil in any way.

The only way they can re-impact on a plant is for them somehow to be brought back in contact with the plant's foliage. Turn over the surface soil, burying any spores that might remain on the surface, and they're out of harm's way.